by Peter Dimock
“It’s not simulated anything. It’s slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration—usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. You can feel every drop. Every drop. You start to panic. And as you panic, you start gasping, and as you gasp, your gag reflex is overridden by water. And then you start to choke, and then you start to drown more. Because the water doesn’t stop until the interrogator wants to ask you a question. And then, for that second, the water will continue, and you’ll get a second to puke and spit up everything that you have, and then you’ll have an opportunity to determine whether you’re willing to continue with the process. Our waterboarders are professional. When the water hits you, you think, ‘Oh shit, this is a whole new level of Bad.’” Make history a discipline for thinking from a place you are not.
George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld requested and authorized these acts to be committed on the bodies of our enemies on behalf of the American people. Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jim Haynes, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Douglas Feith and you, officers of the court and trained counselors of law, sworn to uphold signed treaties and statute laws against acts of torture, wrote binding legal opinions declaring these acts of torture legal when committed for purposes of guarding the security of the American state. Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, . . .
Hold the results of the first day’s exercise in mind with the mental sound of the musical note constructed from the following elements from the method’s three tables: II. I. i(a); i(b). (Again, the first day’s meditative exercise during the week devoted to this method’s second historical subject is to select someone you know and develop a governing scene with which to know them in history. Conduct your practice so that you will be able to tell them someday that you made this imaginative use of their presence.)
Extended notation taken from my practice of this exercise: II. Historical Subject: Derek Takes (Governing scene: Derek bending gracefully to place his head playfully on his mother’s shoulder outside a music store on a New Haven street in 1982 merging with Jesse Bishop dancing naked on a table in front of six white men in a strip club in Lexington, Kentucky in the spring of 1982). I. Truth Statement: Every ruling minority needs to numb, and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. i(a). Constructive Principle (positive): The emancipative dimension of bourgeois literacy creates a sphere of disciplined imaginative freedom beyond the coercions of the marketplace. Universal print literacy as an Enlightenment goal implies a politics of lyric reciprocity—never fully applied in practice—contradicting the logic of accumulation by which contemporary capitalism operates. ii(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Historylessness prevents the construction of narratives of value and necessity in which abundance and the general welfare meet.
Colloquy (delivered to the accompaniment of the second subject’s first note): Fathers killing sons. My father is gone now; I memorize what Marion C. MacRobert wrote. Mother too was unable to stand by herself in the presence of what had been done. Everything is owned.
Dear Derek,
You are the historical subject I could not see—your voice isn’t here on the page though I have tried to hear it. I am jealous. You are the person I cannot be. Absence will have to do instead as an engine of narrative—some speech for another history. My condition is no different, I believe, from that of anyone else, although I have no direct proof of this. So much eye witness testimony has been suppressed that this proposition is impossible to test.
Law does not extend beyond the marchlands. Universalism shimmers distantly. My father did not oppose his father and did what he was told: too often. No approval came. His father came back from France in 1918, his character unrecognizable. My father’s cousins told me this. My father was much honored for his learning and his contributions to humanism. Nothing was done. My mother slept under the eaves of her in-laws’ money and continuously mourned losses she had not earned.
My father was a minister and a strict man. He believed in the Biblical rhythms of King James and championed a naturalist’s plain style to communicate vision. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. / Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. I will not fail my daughter.
We are our fathers’ sons. I hope “Light Years”—both music and lyrics—will bring us closer. It was your parents’ song. And Leda will sing it in June. I see you leaning in light and your mother smiling. I believe that narrative techniques of discontinuity may be used as structures of consent.
I look forward to serving with you on the board of the archive and performance center built in your father’s honor. We will be each other’s allies, I trust and hope. I was your mother’s friend and now study your father’s art as if it were a discipline that could save my life. I realize you may be used to this.
I’m glad your mother spoke well of me and my ideas about American history and Protestant redeemed time. We used to joke about the virtue of limitless New World possession and seventeenth-century enclosures west of Suffolk and Northamptonshire. I remember telling you as a boy of Captain Pouch, the tinker who told his followers God would protect him and those with him who believed in their revolt with what he had in his large satchel. When they captured and killed him, the gentry claimed they opened it and found it full of green cheese. This is the way the encyclopedia now says it: “The rebels were indicted with High Treason and several were executed, including Captain Pouch, who was ‘made exemplary.’”
History is a discipline with which to dissolve an imperial self. I have begun to practice it again by asking to meet with David Kallen on June 19th.
Yours sincerely,
Theo Fales
Second Day’s Exercise: In your action you were brave beyond what anyone in your position had done in years. You sought to know the meaning of torture voluntarily through your own body’s pain so that you could call it by its name. The eighth footnote of your legal finding then revoked the main text’s finding of illegality and granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes to the president, vice-president, attorney general, secretary of defense, director of intelligence, and all their attorneys (among whom it is necessary to include yourself). Through you, torture was a policy chosen legally by U.S. citizens in 2002 and 2004 with which to realize the general will.
On this second day of meditation on the second historical subject, compose in your mind a narrative of democracy in which the U.S. state is the means of accomplishing justice. Our declaration of the ends of government and history—the universal rights of citizens—must be lived as more than ideology. Choose a story illustrating this necessity during this exercise.
Hold in mind the results of this exercise with the mental sound of the musical note constructed from the following elements of the method’s three tables: II. II. ii(a); ii(b). Extended notation: II. Historical Subject: Derek Takes (Governing scene: Derek bends down and playfully places his head on his smiling mother’s shoulder. This scene gives way to and merges with the image of Jesse Bishop in a strip club in Lexington, Kentucky dancing naked in front of six white men). II. Truth Statement: The most important of these things is the structure of events, for tragedy is the mimesis not of persons but of life and action. Happiness and unhappiness consist in action and the goal is a certain kind of action and not a qualitative state. It is by virtue of character that persons have certain qualities, but it is through their actions that they are happy or the reverse. ii(a). Constructive Principle (positive): It is both possible and necessary to live the true history of your one true love. ii(b). Constructive principle (negat
ive): Within structures of complicity, reciprocity must be improvised moment-to-moment each day. This is made difficult by the pleasures and rewards of benefitting from atrocity.
Colloquy (delivered to the accompaniment of the second note of the method’s second historical subject): Liberalism’s techniques of freedom as absolute possession made modern slavery possible. I am valuable because she came back.
I am valuable because a woman came back to see who I had become when I was four. I wrote one letter to Jesse Bishop. In it I asked about Robert. I never heard anything back.
Why did you sign the legal document making torture legal while claiming it was abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms? Why do I not act more bravely to undo the results or what you wrote? How are either of us now to live the one true history of his one true love?
Third Day’s Exercise: The goal throughout the practice of these exercises is to connect image, word, and act in a sequence with which to refuse empire and create reciprocity. The goal is to create some speech for the present as history. In the Jesuit version of this method, you are asked on the third day of the second subject’s practice to remember Peter with a sword cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Jesus heals him: all failed acts can be rectified once narratives of transcendence are effectively in place in daily life. Events happen only once and in only one way. This is dogma and the basis for narrating historical justice. Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Law did not extend beyond the marchlands to native inhabitants and strangers whose lives were already forfeit. Everything in the New World could be possessed (this was our discovery). Incorporate this truth within a narrative principle chronicling events among equal historical selves.
From the Enlightenment principles of autonomy, community (formed on the basis of family love), and cultivation (through education) emerges the concept of a universal humanity (beginning to resonate with attributes like “pure” and “common”) that opens onto an inner realm of freedom (operating by its own laws) without any extrinsic purposes whatsoever. Having created the notes of New World reciprocity, composed the music, and performed it naturally, ask your one true love to answer you from safe inside the common place you’ve made.
After my direct vision during the music at Mary Joscelyn’s funeral service, I found my one true love by acting on desire.
On July 13, 2008 I encountered Donald Rumsfeld at ease and unguarded in a public place and I did nothing. I cannot plead ignorance or any slackness in the discipline with which I practice this method.
In the event you were able to act and I was not. I gave a rhetorical shape to Fred Avery’s memoir (I still consider him a friend) and attended the ceremony at which he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barring another history, the rhetorical shape I gave to Fred Avery for his narrative of his years as the director of the CIA between 1997 and 2004 makes forgiveness meaningless.
I spend my days now sorting through Judith’s papers, practicing this method, creating the notes of reciprocity it makes possible.
Hold in mind the results of this exercise’s contemplations with the mental sound of the second subject’s third note constructed from the combination of the following elements from the method’s three tables: II. III. iii(a); iii(b). (Remember that the task of this exercise is to apply to yourself the discovery in the New World that law beyond the marchlands did not apply to natives or strangers; order’s logic then concludes that it lies in the general interest of human kind that everything can be owned.)
Extended notation: II. Historical Subject: Derek Takes (Governing scene: Derek gracefully bends towards his mother and places his head upon her shoulder. This moment gives way to the image of Jesse Bishop’s unforgiving beauty as she dances on a table in a strip club in front of six white men. She braids their lust with their loss and cowardice and makes possession drunken and a portrait of the visible.). III. Truth Statement: I would like to arrive at the point where I am able to grasp the essence of a certain place and time, compose the work, and play it on the spot naturally. iii(a). Constructive Principle (positive): The only serious philosophical question is the question of what Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back. What she sees in his face determines the worth of his song. Orpheus sang to make epic accountable to lyric’s sudden politics of light’s immediacy—words and notes for what an event means or meant to someone privately—to you, to me. His voice wakes the weightlessness of stones in flight and makes love available for thought. “If I return to life for you, an instrumentalism of form will triumph over what the dead are murmuring.” iii(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Empire replaces history with the stochastic management of the advantage secured through the application of unlimited force. Words fail to mean themselves. “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.” “While we have identified various disagreements with the August 2002 Memorandum, we have reviewed this Office’s prior opinions addressing issues involving treatment of detainees and do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this memorandum.” Stochastics is that branch of statistical mathematics that concerns random sets of observations, each plotted as a point on an independent distribution curve. Narration establishes the redemptive logic of limitless force. Spectacle enforces complicity with empire. Complicity with torturers demands a lyrical politics of absolute loss.
Fourth Day’s Exercise: Decide upon a valued quality possessed by your second historical subject’s character. Show it in action by constructing a governing scene of democratic reciprocity. I failed to knock on Jesse and Robert’s door the day after I drove Jesse home. The CIA destroyed the video recordings it had made for instructional purposes of the interrogations of high-value detainees. Frederick Avery made it a condition of the publication of his memoir by McClaren Books and NCI that the illegal destruction of this evidence not be mentioned in his memoir. I made no objections to this condition of publication nor did I include its meaning in the rhetorical shape I gave Fred Avery’s first-person sincerity.
The quality I chose for Derek is his sympathy, after what his mother told him, for his father as a boy coming home from school to stand in front of Derek’s dying grandfather sitting in the middle of his unmade bed surrounded by instruments (drum, cornet, violin, guitar). The moment of reciprocity I choose is Derek’s decision to use the discipline he knew from his father’s playing to build a school.
Hold the results of this exercise’s contemplation in your mind with the mental sound of the second subject’s fourth note. Construct this note by combining the following elements from the method’s three tables: II. IV. iv(a); iv(b).
Extended notation from my practice: II. Historical Subject: Derek Takes (Governing scene: Derek bends down towards his mother’s smiling face. This scene gives way and merges with the image of Jesse Bishop dancing in front of six white men.). IV. Truth Statement: Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future that replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear very much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. iv(a). Constructive Principle (positive): Create or join a society of equal historical selves (SOEHS). iv(b). Constructive Principle (negative): During the narration of history of any kind, be sure to attend to the sound of reproach in the voices of all the anonymous dead
.
Colloquy (delivered defensively from inside the lost entitlement to absolute possession to the accompaniment of the second subject’s fourth note): This white page—this immediacy. When you receive my phone call after having read and begun to practice this method for yourself, remember that I am valuable because she came back. (I learned from my mother’s diary that the woman in my vision, standing in the doorway of my parents’ apartment in New Haven, was, in the event, Melisande Chandless, a Jamaican nurse who cared for me as an infant when my mother couldn’t take care of her newborn for the first thirteen weeks of its life. (My mother wrote in her diary that she turned to the wall and would not speak when her baby was offered her to hold.) She was mourning a first child who had died nine months before this new birth. She wrote that she couldn’t bear the sight of another thing she would care for and fail. Art, she said, was the only thing that could make duration valuable. When narrating history of any kind, be sure to give your words, as much as you can, their local colors and sounds.
Fifth Day’s Exercise: Narrate the moment you first decided to practice the present as history. For me I think it came early when I saw in the radiance of her face from behind my mother’s skirt that I was valuable and worthy of her question. (I knew my mother would not let her through the door.) This happened when I was four and then again in my vision as I listened to the music at Mary Joscelyn’s funeral. Words are sound and vision before they’re written forms—open not just to interpretation but also to embodiment. Nevertheless, I know now few really listen to this music.
Hold in your mind the results of this exercise’s meditations with the mental sound of the second subject’s fifth note. Construct this note by combining the following elements from the method’s three tables: II. V. i(a); i(b). (The task of the exercise is to narrate the decision to experience the present moment as a historical one. History is a discipline with which to think from a place you are not.)